I have found that although SmartyValidate works extremely well for validating and setup of validators on Smarty 3.1, it fails with a
"Uncaught exception 'SmartyException' with message 'Call of unknown method 'trigger_error' " if there is an error in registering or setup of the validation vars.
This is using the Smarty.class.php as per the SmartyValidate instructions.

That said this error message goes away but the page fails silently and stops loading where the error should be shown by smarty if I use the SmartyBC.class.php instead

In my smarty subclass I have debugging, force compile, show errors and Error unassigned all on for debugging purposes.

I don't yet understand enough of PHP to fix this but hopefully someone will point me in the right direction to get these errors being shown.